By Robin D. Stone
Essence
2/02
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There's Constance Baker Motley--the first Black woman to become a federal judge--recounting her harrowing trip to a jail cell to check on inmates Ralph Abernathy and Martin Luther King, Jr. There's Barbara Harris, the first woman elected bishop of the U.S. Episcopal Church, detailing the early challenges of women in the pulpit. And photographer and filmmaker Gordon Parks, delighting in the tale of how he bluffed his way into his first fashion-photography job.

These African-American sheroes and heroes--along with many other celebrated leaders, educators, artists and icons--share very personal conversations on videotape as part of the National Visionary Leadership Project. Cofounded by Camille O. Cosby and Renee Poussaint, the ambitious oral history program kicked off in 2001 with a six-figure investment from Cosby. It aims to record and preserve the autobiographies of notable African-Americans 70 years and older, and to teach leadership skills to young people.

You can find excerpts from the interviews at NVLP's Web site, visionaryproject.com, and in a new companion book, A Wealth of Wisdom: Legendary African American Elders Speak (Atria Books), by Cosby and Poussaint. You can also see the full interviews in the library of the NVLP headquarters just north of the White House in Washington, D.C.

So far Cosby, the educator, producer and wife of comedian Bill Cosby, and Poussaint, an award-winning broadcast journalist, have interviewed about 60 elders and trained more than 50 college students to conduct their own interviews of Black elders.
Robin D. Stone recently talked with Cosby and Poussaint, both 59, about plans for the program and the importance of shaping our own history.

ROBIN STONE: You've invested enormous amounts of time and money in the National Visionary Leadership Project. Why is this so important to you and to our people?

CAMILLE COSBY: We must become critical thinkers. And the only way to be a critical thinker is to know the truth about our history. All of us have been guilty of just absorbing what the media tells us about ourselves. But we must question what we're told. And listening to oral histories will give us a different view of ourselves.

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